Get Lost (in Montana)

Who is the toughest audience for a travel brand?

Locals. When you’re already in love with the product, you take offense if the marketing conflicts with your emotions.

Not to mention, many locals would rather not advertise their private playground to outsiders at all. Yet it's locals who travelers want to connect with the most, to get the inside scoop, places to go, stay and eat off the beaten path; to feel less like a traveler and more like a local. We designed a progressive campaign and social platform to get locals engaged and connect them with travelers.

It all started with a sticker. The call to action was strong and emotional, yet ambiguous. It was embraced by lovers and cynics alike, because Get Lost means what you want it to. Stickers proliferated across the state, the country, and the world like the mix tapes and secret handshakes of yesterday. It was virality in the real world.

The stickers created intrigue, and that intrigue led to GetLostMT.com. The website was listed in small type, but a large majority of traffic came from organic search—people wanting to figure out just what this is.

Makoshika State Park—it’s like another world, and most Montanans didn’t even know it was waiting in their backyard. This TV and online :30 spot gives the viewer a window into that world, while revealing just enough information to get them to the website.

The virality of the mythos of Get Lost creates an ever-increasing baseline level of traffic, while out-of-the-box and guerrilla advertising generate seasonal interest from a wider audience. Click-through rates for online ads have outperformed the industry by 75%.

Once on the site, users sign in through Facebook and share their favorite stories of Montana’s off-the-beaten-path side. Over time, the 100%-organic database has become a travel resource so unique and helpful that it’s even used by the toughest audience of all—our employees.

Seeing the sticker oversize in off-the-beaten-path locations like grain silos or hay bales enhanced the virality and reinforced the idea of getting lost—and going to the website.

When it was time to take the campaign to the next level, there was only one choice: make the stickers bigger and put them in places where you would, in fact, be getting lost. Active users of the site’s Bucket Lists and other features increased 194% in the first two months.

The campaign has won several HSMAI awards spanning the past two years as it continues to gain followers and evolve.